


the mirror shows not your values are all shot

by braigwen_s



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Because It's Like. Borderline, Beifong Family Feels, Blood, Breaking Mirrors, Gen, God Help Me I Was Only Nineteen - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Inaccurate Self-Image, Issues, Mommy Issues, That Very Specific Form Of Anguished Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 03:38:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19759822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/braigwen_s/pseuds/braigwen_s
Summary: Just days after Suyin has been sent to Gaoling, Lin is - as she has been so often - home alone.  It's just her, and her ghosts, and the woman in the mirror with the scarred face she doesn't know.





	the mirror shows not your values are all shot

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Mumford & Sons song.

There was only one mirror in Toph Beifong’s house, in the large room the children shared. Toph was blind, so this made sense, but Lin hated that room for Suyin’s presence and all mirrors for the same. She could do without both together.

In the background of her vision, Su’s bed sat, unmade, untouched. Just like she’d never left.

In the foreground, her own face blinked back at her –

Not that she could see it as her face, yet. It was too strange, too foreign. Two lurid strips of purple in place of what should have been her cheek.

She reached up a hand and scrubbed her eyes, gingerly touched the edge of one of the wounds. She was exhausted, and what-should-have-been-her-cheek was burning with infection – Aunt Katara had been right, she shouldn’t be back at work yet, but she’d be damned if she admitted it. All she wanted was to close the door, change out of her uniform, and fall asleep. And she could do that, now, she didn’t have to stay awake and cook for an ungrateful sibling.  
But –

Every time she tried to look away, her peripheral vision saw a fleeting shadow that her mind told her was Su.

Every time she tried to look back, the marred young woman meeting her gaze was so lost, and anguished, and – and weak.

The mirror was taunting her.

A sudden burst of rage welled through her. She screamed, and lunged forward, and drove her fist through the cruel glass.

The mirror shattered, a sparkling, crystalline rainshower. It looked beautiful. Lin hated it even more.

She fell to her hands and knees, looked for the biggest shard. Found it, and let it cut into her palm and fingers as she picked it up and stood shakily.

And then her close-quarters training kicked in, and the rage kicked back in too. She screamed again, long and painful, as she whirled and drove the shard into her sister’s pillow. She yanked it out, and feathers erupted, and she stabbed it again, and again, and again, and again. When that was done for, she moved onto the blankets, and then the sheets, and then –

The mattress was nothing but loose feathers, and she’d been scoring the wooden bedframe.

Panting, she turned, looking for another target, something else Su had left behind. Her eyes fell to her scrapbooks.

Suyin had a hobby in gluing news clippings to thick-bound reams of paper – they often got into screaming matches when Lin hadn’t finished reading the article in question. It wasn’t just from newspapers, though, there were pictures from magazines as well, stupid singers and dancers and sculptors, pretentious high society elite that Lin could never shake her feeling of inadequacy toward –

She dug the makeshift knife through one cover, tearing the soft leather and spattering it with blood. She looked at it, surprised – her hand wasn’t hurting at all, and she hadn’t noticed the scarlet rivulets running down her upper arm – then continued destroying Su’s belongings.

She tore through every page in that scrapbook, and then opened the next

– Her face was looking back at her. Her real face, her unmarred face, this was why she broke the mirror, her –

Her face.

She grabbed the clipping with her free hand, smearing red onto the sepia, and confirmed it. She had been in her cadet uniform, she remembered that day, the stupid press people had heard that she was training and –

Her face. Her uniform. The news.

Su had kept clippings of her too.

Not just those stupid artists.

A burning, painful droplet drilled itself from her eye into her cheek. She pretended it was just more blood, or maybe the scabs had split open and it was pus. Either way, it might hurt less than the truth.

Half, she told herself, only half. She’s not really my sister –

She disgusted herself. _Like that matters_.

“We’ve got to stick together,” she’d told Su, when they were fourteen-and-eight, and sitting on her own bed, always Lin’s bed, it was always her that was impacted –

“We’ve got to stick together.”

Su had frowned, swinging her feet. “Because we’re both bastards?”

Lin had nearly truly struck her, then. Had just scowled and swatted lightly at her hand and told her not swear.

If they’d had a proper parent she wouldn’t have held back. She would’ve made a fist and swung and hit her. Would’ve shouted never to use that word, other people used it enough for both of them, she didn’t have to help them out. But she was stuck being mom-but-called-sister, so she told her off for language instead.

Slowly, slowly, her hand opened, and the shard thumped to the ground. There were lines of fresh blood welling, from where she’d held the edges, and suddenly she could feel the sting. There were smaller cuts as well, but there was no pain from them yet.

From the floor, her spattered eye leered back, and when she held her head still the cuts weren’t visible. She sat, for a few moments that took forever, in a staring contest with herself.

She felt vaguely feverish, vaguely cold, and very lonely.

She couldn’t force her chest to stop heaving.

Blood-soaked and exhausted and hyperventilating from her own sobs – oh, it was her sobbing – she gave herself up for unconsciousness.


End file.
